Tuesday, May 08, 2012

When does a person die? We know a
person as a living organism, but when they die, their body is still
alive, full of bacteria. The bacteria keeps going. Or when somebody is
in a coma. The body keeps going. Of course it sounds like a silly
question, because we know when a person is dead, and when a person is
alive. But how? How do we know this? The medical definition is when a
heart stops beating, yet that is not death either, as people come back
from that condition all the time. And if they come back, where is it
that they come back to?

When
my dad was first sent to a care facility, for some reason at that
moment it occurred to me that his condition is definitive proof that
there is no heaven and by default, no afterlife at all. How could any
creature, divine or otherwise, be able to make a distinction between
optimal states of one's being? If I lose my hand in real life, does it
come back to me in heaven? Or if I lose my marbles, does the afterlife
put them back in? Of course not, as no divine force would work on a
scale of human aesthetics. There is no way to separate the inner
workings of a disease such as Pick's, and the expanse of one's
personality. There is no dividing line. Biologist's mapped the entire brain
of the incredibly simple roundworm, and found that even in a creature
this stupid there is actually not one brain, but three brains in one, a network constantly
modifying, responding to, and changing the neurons and synapses of the other two. Now imagine how complex our brains must be. How could anything know where to draw the line on a thing that never stop changing, and say, "Here. Here
is where this creature was most perfect and from here they will live
on."

Questions
like these, questions that have no answers, point to problems not with
divinity, but with how we think about ourselves. Specifically, that we
are entities, distinct from each other and from the world around us.
That we are special because we have a unique ability to articulate,
observe, and control our surroundings in ways that are light years ahead
of anything else on the planet. We are different from other creatures,
and not only that, we are different from each other. It's a real skill
and helps us divide the screws from the nuts so we can spend our lives
putting together airplanes instead of searching for food. We are
special because we exist on a plane once removed from the world of
animals.We dwell in reason and abstraction, and because of this, we are
different than cats or plants.

We
don't know how or why the universe got started but we can trace it back
to a single point. We can know how old the universe is by measuring the
distance that light travels. We assume that life arose out of a
primordial sludge. That this substance and that substance, carbon and
water and maybe something else, banged against each other, randomly, and
somehow, something came to life. In some pool, or pond, or crater or
boulder, a microscopic spark leapt between two inanimate objects.
Perhaps this happened on our planet, perhaps it happened somewhere else,
and was delivered to our planet. We don't know. But we assume that we
are made of the same things that stones are made of, though arranged
differently.

That
said, as far as we know, life comes from life. That's the only way
we've gotten to it. As much as we've accomplished in the realm of
science, we haven't come up with a way to create a living cell out of
something that was not already alive. What's so mysterious to me about
even the simplest (compared to us) organism, such as a tree, is the
impulse to grow. If it really is a biochemical reaction of proteins
triggering DNA triggering proteins triggering growth, why aren't we able
to replicate this? Even if we are complex machines, built out of
matter, what is this strange will to be alive that everything living
thing has? Is it just the result of a chemical equation playing itself
out? An algorithm to gather nutrients? To say nothing of our experience
of being (which is more of a philosophical question), more so than
reason, I feel like this "will to live" is something I have in common
with everything that is also alive. We want to be here. Perhaps this is the most fundamental thing we can know about who we are.

Counter
intuitive as it might seem, it makes more sense to think of ourselves
as blips in a river a consciousness rather than blips in the void of
space. That we appear and disappear not from nothing, but from something
that is already there. It's a Buddhist idea, and most definitely
something that I cannot speak to with any kind of authority. However it
answers questions like what happens after death and where did we come
from and what is our purpose by short circuiting the logic: we never
die. I mean, we die yes, our individual consciousnesses die, but parts
of us live on. The sperm and the zygote growing up and replicating times
a zillion billion. And even when the last human disappears, life
continues. We only die if "we" are what we think, our intellect and
personality and reason. A cat pays as close attention to the world as we
do, as does a single celled organism. It's just that they pay attention
to different things.

What
is this thing called attention and what is the will that keeps us
afloat? I've quoted it before, George Oppen and the poem "World,
World--": "The self is no mystery, the mystery is/ That there is
something for us to stand on." Yeah. How strange it is to be anything at
all (to quote Jeff Magnum). And so ideas of the soul and the self,
ridiculous as they sound now to our cynical and scientific ears, a
glowing ball leaving one's body and haunting a closet or finding it's
way into a new born, seem completely couched in dead end ideas of who
and what we are. I'd venture to say that much of western science comes from the presumption that things, including ourselves, are distinct and separate from each other. A worldview that is wonderful for sorting and working methodically, but is not so helpful when it comes to being with other living things. Instead of stars punched out of nothingness, alone in
the night sky, what if the night sky is just another way for the stars to be? What if the answers to our questions have been with us
the entire time?